AT&T Labs Libraries intranet website
This screenshot showing Welcome to the AT&T Labs Libraries offers a small peek into the extent of material and information design that was provided on the AT&T intranet website, http://library.research.att.com.
The site used an underlying MS Access database and ODBC drivers to populate the content to the website’s pages, with SQL scripts used to allow for on-the-fly rendering and refinement of the information. This enabled me and my team of Masters-level librarians to proactively and dynamically keep the displayed material current and fresh, by regularly updating content records that were in the database. Not everyone on my team was comfortable with editing html; but, all of them could keep their assigned modules in the database up to date.
In various pages on the website, search dialog boxes were available to the end-user, so that the user could perform his/her own search of content from the back-end database, within an SQL-scripted wrapper that was designed to assist him/her to retrieve the type (format) of content requested. This was used, in particular, in the options "Journals Online," "Journals at Shannon" and "Journals at Austin." All three of these were variants of data pulled from the same table in the MS Access database; but, the search dialog box for the end-user had a script running behind it that filtered the results appropriately.
The photo of the library shows that my approach to design was imbued in the physical world as well. Circa 1998, when the library was opened, the idea of a corporate library having an intranet site was novel. As a form of marketing, I added the url of the website, which also happened to say what the physical space was as well, to the glass outer walls of the library. This was intended to underscore the concept that both the library and the website were one and the same; they were a cohesive and integrated whole. And, when you walked through the doors of the library, you were entering the information space, also represented by the website.